


Bridefall pond

by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dark, Incubi, M/M, Multi, Supernatural - Freeform, mildly supernatural, mind possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 18:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4111426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Arthur sees him is one day at the park, playing footie with Mordred. He was standing just behind his son, ready to snatch him away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bridefall pond

**Author's Note:**

> Not my best work. But I had to get it out.

The first time Arthur sees him, all he sees is a shadow. They're in the park, him and Mordred, kicking at the new football Lance had gotten him for his birthday. Mordred, every inch of eight, tallish and slender, growing into his body, and Arthur, the proud as punch father, ready to intercept the black and white ball that comes his way. 

All of a sudden, a shadow falls on them. 

It feels like a harbinger of evil, an ill omen, and it chills Arthur to the bone, as if there was something ready to take him, to possess him, to drag him down to hell, which was possibly where he belonged-

"Dad?" He looks down.

Mordred is by his side, confusion marring his childish face. "What's wrong?"

He raises his eyes to where he saw the shade. "Nothing love." he hears himself say.

Blue eyes haunt him all the way home.

 

_"Hey there."_

_"Hey yourself."_

_"Are you sure about this?"_

_"About what?"_

_"For God's sake, don't be an idiot."_

_"Always."_

_The hand snakes between them, wraps around his, and a shy kiss is stolen from his lips._

_"Your idiot."_

 

That should have been the end of it, it  _should._ But life has a funny way of turning tables on you when you least expect it.

He's in the kitchen, making brunch for Mordred and his friends. (They're all in the back yard, doing whatever it is, eight year olds get up to. He can hear Mordred's high pitched giggle all the way here in the house.) The lights start to flicker. Arthur frowns and looks up. 

He is engulfed in a cold, wet embrace.

 _"I have waited long, my love."_ a long lost voice croons in his ear. He feels something moist nuzzle at his neck, sucking, biting, licking. Arthur freezes. Surely his mind was playing tricks on him? Surely not now, after all these years? It is an embrace he knows, an embrace he has longed for, an embrace that ignites a fire in the most primeval parts of his body.

A cold, slimy embrace. Arthur feels it, damp and pestilent, running down his sides, covering his back, hovering over his groin. He throws his head back against the touch, a gasp escaping, as soft as a lost love's moan, when long, slithering hands slide into the secret place between his legs-

_Crash!_

His mother's old crystal dish falls to the floor with an almighty sound, breaking into smithereens, bringing the children running to the kitchen. 

"Mr. P, are you okay?"

He catches his breath, ragged and harsh as it is, looks around and nods. 

There's blue eyes twinkling malevolently over his son's head.

 

_I carry your heart with me_

_I carry it in my heart.*_

 

"Something's wrong, Gwen." Arthur takes a gulp of his coffee,watching his co-worker sip at hers daintily, wincing as the hot bitter liquid burns its way down his gullet. She looks up and arches an eyebrow. "How so?"

"There's something bothering me. It's just a feeling that comes and goes, but it's sort of... bothering me." Gwen makes a noise indicating that he go on. And he does, with no intention of stopping. "It's like something that's been sleeping in my head's woken up, and started to torment me." "Like a memory?" "Yes!" he bites out. "Exactly like a memory- except it really isn't. It's like an alternate reality thing, something like a nightmare coming to the real world. I know that sounds crazy, but it's getting a bit weird."

Gwen watches him intensely. For a moment he wishes he could love her and move along, but then-

"Is it bothering you a lot?"

He opens his mouth to say yes, and he feels slimy hands wrap around his throat.

 

_"Oh, oh oh!"_

_"That's right, darling. How does it feel, being stretched up like this? Is this what you wanted, mm love? Is this what you dreamed of every night when you touched yourself?"  
_

_"I-I-I- Ah!"_

_"What was that love?"_

_"P-p-please, Arthur. Oh!"_

 

It's been a late night at work. Mordred's been with the neigbours all day, and he's just finished putting him to bed. There's a nip in the air and it reaches under his clothes, sending chilly fingers down his spine. He catches his breath and closes his eyes. There's a shudder behind him.

 _"My love, you've been gone too long."_ The whisper is in his ear, in his head, inside him and out. He gasps.

"Who are you? What are you?" he asks.

The voice laughs, and he feels the ghost fingers trail up and down his arms.

_"Why so cold, my love? Have you forgotten?"_

Arthur flashes his eyes open. How dare he-? "I have  _never_ forgotten." He growls. "Never."

_"Haven't you my love?"_

There is something sinister about this voice. Once Arthur had loved it dear, once he had cherished it. And now...

"What do you want of me?" he grinds out.

There is an invisible lick on his ear, a breath that smells of inky roses and death ghosting over his lips. Arthur is arrested by its power, it's presence, when he knows that it's all in his head,  _all in his head._

_"What do you think I want, dear heart?"_

_Vengeance,_ Arthur thinks.  _Vengeance for what I did to you, never mind that I never meant it that way, that I loved you,and you did not listen._

He stops thinking when the ghosting hands run down his sides, and a wet rasping mouth sliding over the front of his trousers, the faint, insistent tugging at his belt growing stronger by the minute. The invisible creature overpowers him, and a pleasure he has not known in so long invades his senses. This is wrong, the back of his mind screams. And yet he is powerless against it. 

When the suction stops, and the mouth pulls off Arthur backs into the wall and lets out a juddering breath.

"After all these years," he says, softly. "After all these years, why now?"

There is no answer, but somewhere in the house a window bangs. 

Arthur is covered in cold dread when he realizes that it's the one in Mordred's room.

 

_I will seek and I will pursue,_

_I will follow, as echo did Narcissus,_

_I will drag you to my watery home._

 

The voice on the receiving line is shaky.

"Morgana"

The woman frowns. "Arthur? what do you want?"

"You have to take him. Please. Mordred."

She's angry. "I can't believe you ask me to take him all of a sudden. Why is this Arthur? Have you found a new fling? Have you met someone so you think you can cast your son aside?"

There is a pause. "You know better of me than to think anything would matter to me more than Mordred. I want what's best for him, and right now, it isn't being with me." Again a pause. "He is our son, Morgana, and hate me as you may, I know you love him. It's not safe for him to be here- to be  _with_ me anymore." There's a desperation in his voice and she's never heard it before. 

The months and months of animosity melt just enough to let a silver of care worm back into the top of her heart. "Arthur is everything okay? Is something going on?"

"Morgana there's-" a sharp gasp cuts off her ex-husband before he finishes whatever he was going to say. "Arthur?"

"No, Morgana. Everything is  _not_ alright."

 

_"It was all a lie."_

_"No, Merlin please-"_

_"You only wanted to win a bet!"_

_"That's how it started, but Merlin that wasn't-"_

_"You're a bastard, Arthur Pendragon."_

_He turns away from the beloved, tear streaked face, that he so wants to kiss._

_"Believe me when I say it, I will have my vengeance."_

 

Morgana arrives on Saturday morning, sharp at nine. Mordred stares at her defiantly, his pretty blue eyes filled with tears. Arthur can't bear to look at them.

"Take care of my boy." He tells her, looking down. "and leave, please."

He can hear his son's wails from outside. "Daddy Daddy I'll be good, I will! Please don't send me away, PLEASE!"

He falls onto the door, heaving out a sob. Around him, the air thickens, and and congeals like old porridge. 

_"Pushing everyone away, love? You were good at that, even then."_

 

_Licence my hands and let them go_

_Below behind above between below.**_

 

"Is this your vengeance?" Arthur asks the darkness, still against the invisible bonds that tie him to the bed. That rasping, pestilent tongue licks at his nipples, bites and sucks a red path down to his groin. The long, bony fingers, much like the ones he had once loved (that now felt skeletal) push into him, heedless of resistance. Arthur tries to let go of his senses. He will pretend he cannot feel the onslaught, the pleasure, the pain. He will not grant it the joy of a reaction. 

But when the orgasm rolls on to him like a black oily tidal wave, clinging and drenching, he can't stop himself from screaming.

 

_"Poor boy, fell into the lake last night."_

_"surely it was an accident?"_

_"Oh, I'm sure it was. There's the marks where his bicycle slipped on the bank of Bridefall pond."_

_"Merlin my love, no! Not my boy! Gaius, save my son! Please!"_

 

"I didn't kill you." He says raggedly. The village no longer remembers him. But Bridefall pond is as dark and murky as it had been, long years ago when Merlin Emrys fell into the lake and drowned. It was a memory Arthur tried to forget. Merlin's white hot anger and anguish, his own guilt and pain, and Hunith's grief that drowned them both, not a month later.

The lake does not stir.

"I did not kill you!" There is no answer

_"Tell them I came and nobody answered_

_That I kept my word!" he said.***_

 

"Is this your vengeance?" he asks again, at last, driven to the ends of his wits. The shade haunted him by the day, by the hour as he stood, where they had last spoken. 

_"This is no vengeance, my love."_

"I wronged you. I am no love of yours! Please, stop tormenting me!"

_"You torment yourself, love. It is not I."_

"Then leave me be, please. Leave me to rot in my sins. God knows I've done plenty."

There is no answer.

 

_"come to me, my love."_

Blue eyes, entreat him in the dead of the night. Try as he may, he cannot ignore the call. It leads him to Bridefall, like a strange and lonely phantom doomed to roam the Earth for all eternity. 

Blue eyes wait for him at the glassy shore.

_"Arthur, my love."_

"Merlin. What is this?"

_"Do you doubt me?"_

"You have no cause to love me."

_"But you are mine."_

"I-" he pauses. Of course the power, the supernatural pull is too great on him. "I am yours."

The spectre smiles.  _"Then come to me love. Come to me, where they cannot separate us."_

"I will. Anywhere." He takes the invisible hand.

Bridefall is silent. Save for an unheard splash.

 

"I'm so sorry, my dear."

The boy is silent, staring at the expanse of the water. Morgana takes his hand.

"This is hard for you I know. I can't imagine- I mean, I don't know-" she clutches his hand tightly. Mordred squeezes his mother's hand. It seems that she is in need of comfort, more than her son. 

"He must have been mad of loneliness to even try to come up here."

Mordred shivers involuntarily. He remembers that night, the wet voice whispering in his ear. 

_"I have waited, long and hard, for the right time. And I will not have you throw a spanner in the works."_

He had been still, frozen with fear.

 _"I will haunt, I will torment, I will destroy, I will-"_ and it had disappeared, clanging the windows and letting a rush of wind in.

It had been there the night Dad died, he was sure of it. 

_"Rage and hurl and howl and horrify."_

"We should get back love. It would never do to be alone here, like your poor father."

"But mum, I don't think he was alone that night...'

_Until you lay with me, my love._

**Author's Note:**

> *"I carry your heart with me"- E.E. Cummings  
> ** Sonnet 20- John Donne  
> *** The listeners- Walter de la Mare


End file.
